Page 31 of Prince Cheating Charming

There was a brief knock on the office door and my heart leaped in my throat.

Delilah?

But it was my mother with a frown on her face.

“Has Delilah decided to stay?” she asked abruptly.

“No,” I replied, my voice sounding dull and dead to my ears. “She still wants to leave at the end of the month.”

Unless I can find some way, any way, to convince her to stay!

“What a silly girl!” Mom complained. “All the press are going to be so nasty if she leaves. All those vultures would love to blame you for this embarrassing situation.”

My hands stilled and I looked up at her.

“I am to blame,” I said harshly. “This whole thing is entirely my fault. She’s leaving because I cheated on her.”

Mom waved her hand back and forth dismissively.

“So what? You’re a man. You weren’t cruel to Delilah. I thought you were very kind to her. Especially considering how uninteresting and quiet she is.”

My teeth gritted together.

“Never speak about her like that, ever again. I didn’t appreciate Delilah but that’s all changed now. Now I’m going to appreciate her like she deserves.”

Mom still looked skeptical. “I knew you should have chosen a lady from Norjava. Someone who would understand a king’s needs.”

“I didn’t want any other woman,” I said harshly. “I don’t want any other woman. I want Delilah and she’s the only woman I will ever want. You will speak respectfully about my wife or you will be going to live at our beach house permanently and not allowed back in the palace. Now let’s go to dinner.”

Mom’s eyes were wide as she looked at me, but she bowed her head.

Good. I wasn’t going to accept even the smallest disrespect of my wife.

Dinner was bleak and depressing. As usual, ever since Delilah had given me annulment papers, I barely ever saw her at meal times.

It fucking sucked.

My stomach roiled at the sight of her usual chair empty. I didn’t feel like eating anything, but I knew if I didn’t I’d feel even more like shit later, so I forced some of the chicken baked in cream sauce down.

We ate in chilly silence.

Since everyone knew I had cheated on Delilah, Maurice had not been giving his best with the meals, insisting on strange diets and unusual combinations, and serving all of them with a contemptuous disdain. Even the wine was pulled from the least interesting years, and Mom had once caught him serving some awful wine that had been given to the palace as a present from a visiting dignitary.

When she protested that we wanted good wine, he curled up his lip.

“I was under ze impression that ze King preferred the inferior to the obviously vastly superior,” Maurice said witheringly, and I didn’t have shit to say in response.

I deserved it all. It stung knowing that my own staff hated me for what I had done to Delilah. Because it was a reminder of how big of an asshole I was.

“Why did you have to send Jewel away?” Mom complained after a long period of silence.

“Because I don’t want to look at her again,” I replied in a clipped tone. “I don’t want to look at Julia or Jewel, or anybody else I fucked. It’s just a reminder of how badly I screwed up. And I don’t want Delilah to feel like I’m at all tempted to fuck them again. Because even the thought of it is nauseating.”

“There are other women,” Mom said, stabbing a piece of Caesar salad.

“No,” I said bleakly. “For me, there is only Delilah.”

“You should have married Jewel or Julia,” my mother moaned. “And so I told Delilah. She even agreed your marriage was a mistake.”

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